Connecting People in the Workplace through Ephemeral Social Networks

Location-based mobile applications such as Foursquare help bridge the gap between offline and online. People that we encounter and connect with around physical resources such as meetings, provide opportunities for extending our social networks. We investigate how social connections can be established and integrated with workplace resources using location through our application called Find & Connect, and we examine the user behavior around the social connections captured through ephemeral social networks. Results show that offline interactions of encounters and meetings do help in creating online friendships, and that the friend network, friend encounter network and meeting friend participant network form small and uniform subgroups which can be used to enhance friend recommendations and social networking.